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On Criticism

My friend Leonard Pierce has written a thoughtful post on what it means to be a critic and why criticism has value, even in an age of thumbing ratings and aggregated scores. An excerpt:

Criticism can and should sometimes be a painful thing, in the same way that pain calls attention to something amiss in the body. But it should never be about robbing people of the joy of art. The role of the critic is to examine art closely, to see what it’s made of whether wondrous, fraudulent, or nothing at all. Critics should never judge people by how they react to art.